1989

1989 is both the calendar setting for a changing Edinburgh and a point of contact between Hide & Seek and the economic pressures that shaped its writing. At the end of May, the tourists are nearly in season, but the city’s transformation is not merely seasonal: new residents are moving north from southern England, a change that would have seemed implausible to John Rebus five years earlier.

A City in Transition

The novel presents migration to the Lothians as an established fact by 1989, and as ordinary dinner-table conversation. Set against the approaching tourist season, this movement suggests a deeper alteration in the city: Edinburgh is becoming attractive not only to visitors but also to people relocating from the south. The contrast makes urban change feel both sudden and already absorbed into daily life.

The Economic Climate

The book’s retrospective account of its composition places its writing in 1988 and 1989, when its author was living in London during the height of Thatcherism. In that London, red braces and Moët were fashionable, while rising property values dominated conversation in some wine bars. That atmosphere supplies a material backdrop to the novel’s attention to new money and changing property values; the author also connects his own professional frustration and sense of being surrounded by more successful people to the bitter edge of the writing.

The Year in the Novel’s Perspective

The London experience also surfaces through Brian Holmes, whose recollection of his few months as a student there casts them as a deeply unpleasant season. The connection is not simply between two settings: the novel’s account of Edinburgh’s northward pull sits alongside a remembered London of conspicuous money and property speculation. In this way, 1989 registers both as a moment within the story and as part of the recent social climate through which the novel’s urban contrasts took shape.